What Has Been Missing from Real Estate?

Real estate agents love seeing the joy on clients’ faces as they sign the paperwork on their new homes. Helping people navigate this major and exciting, yet stressful, experience motivates agents to work hard in this fulfilling career choice.

However, the industry comes with its challenges. Real estate generally, and especially the rental side, has been missing 2 key elements:

1. A way to earn good money quickly

2. A transparent path to career growth

While a few agents may carve out a clear-cut career path and earn great money fast, the vast majority don’t. Many give up along the way. Moreover, today’s incredibly competitive market only worsens the problem.

Below, we’ll explore several factors contributing to these issues and explain how AptAmigo addresses them to make real estate a more exciting and viable career.

What Factors Contribute to These 2 Problems?

In the age of technology, trends change quickly, and even well-established industries can’t always keep up. The lack of quick earning opportunities and career growth transparency in real estate result from its entrenched, “old” ways. 

With that in mind, let’s explore some of the contributing factors.

Lack of Support

A good support system, or lack thereof, can make or break an agent’s efforts to build a successful career. That means finding a brokerage with the right colleagues and culture for you right at the beginning of your new venture. Most brokerages, however, cater to traditional buy and sell real estate roles. 

Rental agents in those settings tend to find themselves forging ahead without much, if any, mentorship and support.

Sure, some hardworking rental agents succeed, but many, even some truly dedicated ones, give up. Even with the dedicated support of a brokerage, most new buy and sell agents in traditional roles don’t make it.

Lack of Structure

While working for a traditional brokerage lends some structure to buy and sell agents’ lives, independent agents, especially in rental markets, tend to wear (too) many hats. 

They must build relationships with clients, pay for and launch their own marketing campaigns, and handle administrative tasks (bookkeeping, taxes, organization, etc.) all on their own. 

Rental agents also need to forge relationships with buildings and landlords, which adds more complexity to an already chaotic schedule.

Without standardized or established processes for handling all of these responsibilities, agents build their own workflow from scratch. This extra work results in inefficiency and greater stress during earlier career stages.

Outdated, Clunky Technology

Before the pandemic, technology designed to aid real estate agents lagged tremendously behind. Some innovators sat at the forefront of modernizing the industry, such as AptAmigo, with its custom CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and apartment search software, but options remained severely limited.

In particular, agents struggled with clunky, old CRMs, one of the most important tools in the agent’s arsenal because it assists with managing and growing relationships with prospective clients.

While the pandemic forced this technology to evolve somewhat, the industry still lives, in part, in a technological dark age. AptAmigo rose to this challenge early on in its history by hiring its own tech team to create custom technology geared towards enabling their agents’ success.

Limited Growth Opportunities

Some agents manage to build a strong network and close increasingly lucrative deals as they grow their careers. However, even successful independent real estate agents, particularly those focusing on rentals, quickly run into the “only one person” dilemma. 

This reality limits your business’s ability to scale. With so many responsibilities to manage, a single person can only work with so many clients each day.

Takes Years to Start Making Good Money

In traditional real estate roles, it can take years to start earning a decent income. In fact, the high costs associated with the early stages of the process mean that many people start out in the negative, and months can pass by before they close that first sale. 

Selling a house, in particular, often takes many weeks, during which time the agent takes home nothing. Paydays, therefore, arrive at sporadic intervals and can prevent new agents who need to pay their bills and cover basic necessities from following through with their dream.

Starting salaries for new agents in their first year hover in the $20,000s, with prospects increasing with each year of experience. In traditional real estate, it takes about 3 years on average to build the networks and reputation necessary to produce tangible financial results. 

That’s why AptAmigo developed a system to allow sales reps to not only bypass the startup and ongoing marketing costs, but also to close sales and earn money right away. 

Read more about apartment locator salaries to learn about the true earning potential at AptAmigo. While you’re here, why not pick up some good tips about How to Market Yourself as an Apartment Locator?

Not ready to commit to real estate full time? No problem. Consider applying to become a Touring Agent instead. You learn about the position in Is Real Estate a Good Part-time Job?

How We’re Solving These Problems

AptAmigo’s new model for the rental market solves many of these industry problems, introducing to the real estate industry what has been missing from it the most. As a result of our company’s innovative division of labor, we can provide instant access to the systems that typical agents spend years developing. Our apartment locators benefit from the following team structure:

• Operations Team: Our Operations Coordinators handle administrative tasks, including establishing and maintaining relationships with buildings, as well as scheduling tours for your clients. They leave sales reps with more time to focus on clients and guide them to their future home.
• Marketing Team: Marketing takes care of the advertising and supports lead generation. No more paying exorbitant out-of-pocket sums for marketing campaigns with low conversion rates. Instead, AptAmigo’s marketing team brings you the clients without you spending a penny.
• Tech Team: Our technology experts built a cutting-edge, custom CRM program in addition to its own apartment search software. The automated, client handling technology frees up time and enables more meaningful interactions with clients. 
• Touring Team: Touring agents attend in-person apartment showings. They stay with clients through the entirety of their touring experience, coordinating transportation (AptAmigo pays for clients’ Uber rides), asking questions, and taking notes. They even buy coffee or lunch to keep clients energized throughout the process. Sales reps, then, can continue to service new leads and locate apartments for multiple clients at once.

Interested in becoming an apartment locator, but worried about your lack of experience? No need to fret. Apartment locating at AptAmigo requires no previous experience. Our agents, even those new to the industry, begin closing deals within their first week!

Moreover, because AptAmigo agents don’t need to stretch themselves thin with extraneous responsibilities, they get to focus on what they love about the industry: helping their clients find their dream apartments.

If that opportunity excites you, apply to AptAmigo today. We’d love to talk more!